Speech recognizers have gained popularity in recent years. A speech recognizer typically includes software that is run on a computer system to recognize spoken words or phrases. The speech recognizer generally outputs text corresponding to its interpretation of the spoken input. For example, if a speaker speaks the word "dog," the speech recognizer recognizes the spoken word and outputs the text "dog."
Unfortunately, speech recognizers often produced textual output that is awkward or not familiar to recipients. For example, if a speaker speaks the phrase "one hundred forty seven," the speech recognizer outputs "one hundred forty seven" rather than the sequence of digits "147." Similar awkward textual outputs are produced by speech recognizers for inputs that specify dates, times, monetary amounts, telephone numbers, addresses, and acronyms. As a result, the recipient of the textual output is forced to manually edit the text to put it in a more acceptable form. As speech recognizers are being incorporated in document creation software, the inability of the speech recognizers to produce acceptable textual output substantially diminishes the usefulness of such software.